The Waters of Life
by MovinTarget666
Summary: Shepard finds a Lone man on his mission to Palaven. How will this Wanderer with nothing but a number for a name affect the final gam of the series?


The Waters of Life

"Hold up commander," James Vega said as he looked at his HUD. Commander Shepard Stopped and looked at him an he explained, "unknown radiation spike in the vicinity of the air field. Closest comparison the VI can find is that it resembles the Hiroshima fallout from the Second World War."

Shepard looked at his friend, Garrus Vakarian, for some kind of explanation but the Turian only shrugged in response. Shepard activated his pressure seal and closed his suit and waited for his companions to follow suit, "We'll check it out and take care of the Reapers at the same time."

They nodded and the trio headed made sure there were no marauders around them before heading to the field, ready to defend against the newest Reaper attack on the base. They rushed to the field; weapons ready, and had to stop at the sight before them.

A human male stood in the center of the airfield, holding nothing but a strange pistol, firing into a charging horde of Reaper drones. Each and every shot he took killed something; no misses, second shots, second glances, and not a bullet wasted.

The pistol he was using shot strange balls of green at his targets, rendering some to ash, some to goo, and some to regular corpses. Shepard watched in utter astonishment as one of the hulks they had been fighting recently charged the man, and he turned to it and unleashed a duo of shots, incinerating the rampaging creature a second before it crashed into him.

The hulk was apparently the final Reaper to be brought down, and the man turned to the three new comers. He looked from one to another and his eyes landed squarely on Commander Shepard. He holstered his weapon and approached the commander and held his hand out to be shaken. The commander took it numbly and asked the man, "Who _are_ you?"

The man smirked depreciatively and pointed to his throat, where a long gash was present. Shepard nodded in understanding. The stranger then held his hand out to James and then Garrus. They both shook his hand, grinning like they had just won the lottery.

Shepard told his companions to head back to camp and signaled the man to come with them. Smiling, he followed. Vega was nearly back to the entrance when he remembered the radiation spike; he turned around and let the Geiger counter on his HUD tell him where the spike was. To his utter astonishment the radiation was focused solely on the strange man who had just killed the Reapers.

"Sir, that radiation spike…" He said, at Shepard's nod, "Our new friend is irradiated enough to kill a Krogan."

The Commander looked at the stranger in surprise and alarm, and the man gave a shrug that said, _eh what can you do?_ Better than words. This did not calm Shepard and he said, "The second we're back on the Normandy, you are going to be in the infirmary!"

The stranger shrugged again and smirked, then signaled for the Commander to lead the way.

Back on the Normandy

Doctor Karin Chakwas stared blankly at the medical results in front of her. Sitting in her infirmary was a medical impossibility. The amount of radiation that the check had revealed was over two hundred times the lethal dose, but instead of a dead man, there stood the pinnacle of human development. There was nothing good about this man's body, yet it functioned to a capacity that no human could achieve in this day and age.

Turning to look at the man, she could not help but note the ratty clothes that covered him. She had offered him clean BDUs, but he had simply shaken his head and rubbed his strangely armored jumpsuit fondly. The suit showed evidence of patched up bullet holes, stab wounds, burns, and claw marks.

Noting her concerned stare the man smiled and held out the glass he had been given earlier. Smiling as well, Dr. Chakwas refilled it with water and he guzzled it down like a drowning man. Putting some final notes on her pad, she dismissed the stranger and told him to get something to eat.

Dining Hall

EDI exited the AI core and entered the dining hall, looking around with new eyes. She saw several of the crew sitting at a table on the far side of the hall, but there was a strange man reading a paper book, sitting at the nearest table. Walking to the table she was prepared to introduce herself when he looked up. Seeing her his eyes went wide and he looked closer at her.

She would have passed it off as the organic fear of machines if not for the expression in his eyes. They held fascination in them, not persecution. The stranger held out his hand to be shaken and she took it. Smiling with her new mouth she said, "Greetings, I am EDI. May I ask who you are, my databanks show no previous history of you on the Normandy."

The man took on a look of concentration and held his hand to his mouth. After a few seconds of contemplation his eyes turned to the paper book in his hand and he smiled. He flipped through the pages and found the passage he was looking for. He held the book up to the AI and she could see that it was a King James Bible, he pointed to a particular passage. Reading out loud she said, "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely."

He then pointed to the numbers on his clothing. Yellow lettering stood out against blue, proclaiming the numbers 101. EDI categorized all of the man's facial patterns and reactions to his own movements. The passage he had her read gave him comfort and a sense of familiarity and when he she said the numbering on the jumpsuit he had a look of a soldier.

She wondered if she would ever see why.

The Citadel

Liara T'Soni watched as the strange man walked around in the crowded streets with a look of wonder on his face. She watched him look from one store to the next, and then move on without purchasing anything. She noted with some interest that he walked past the shuttle station every time he passed turned around.

She wondered what he was planning. 101 had been an enigma since he had been found on Palaven's moon. He had willingly handed over his pistol for study and from seemingly nowhere had produced several other weapons that worked in a similar fashion. He had even provided schematics for producing the weapons as well as the ammo required. He had simply smiled at the puzzled looks on the faces of the crew and them went to sleep in a corner of the observation deck.

Liara was so entrenched in her contemplation of the man that she had nearly missed when he made his move. She started when she heard a shriek, looking up she saw 101 holding a pistol to the head of a human man who had exited one of the newest refugee shuttles. She began to rise, noting the gathering crowd. She spotted Shepard making his way over to the shuttle station and rushed to catch up.

She caught up with him just as they reached the station and together they pushed their way through the crowd. When they got to the forefront they saw that the local C-Sec officers were holding their weapons to 101's back. Shepard walked into the open space and asked, "101, what are you doing?"

The man turned his head slightly to look at the Commander, then held up his left hand. The strange device that they had all seen glowed for a second before a holographic representation of earth appeared over it. The shuttle captain looked at the stranger holding a gun to his face and asked in disbelief, "you want to go to earth? Are you nuts?"

101 turned his head back to the captain and nodded. He pointed at the shuttle, signifying that he wanted to take it. The captain bristled, "I ain't gonna give you my ship! I have customers to think about!"

101's eyes narrowed; without warning he spun on an axis and fired into the air, causing the gather people and cops to dive for cover. Before anybody could react further, 101 had thrown the captain from his vessel and the bay doors were closing. Eyes focused on the cockpit of the ship, where 101 could be seen working the controls.

Liara remembered Cortez had shown the strange man how to pilot a shuttle. She watched in horror and respect as the shuttle lifted into the air and took off into the sky. Turning to Shepard she saw him telling the C-Sec officers to forget the episode, that the crazy human would end up dead anyway.

She hoped he did not die quickly, but gave the Reapers their money's worth.

In Orbit of Earth

The Harbinger watched as the Mass Relay of the Sol system activated. It did not detect any large ships on its sensors and logic would dictate that no small aircraft would be sent to take Earth for the organics. The great machine soon learned the error of its assumption when it detected an impact on its hull.

The outer carapace had been cracked and an organic slipped through and into its body. Sensors screamed that the organic was poisoning the organic components to the Reaper simply by being inside the ship. Harbinger dispatched its husks to deal with the pest. Estimations projected that the organic would be killed in a matter of moments and assimilated into the horde.

Estimations can be wrong. Had Harbinger been capable of emotion it would have felt fear and worry as it detected the organic approaching its core. It could not however and simply redoubled its efforts to indoctrinate the organic. Its efforts failed and the organic entered the chamber holding Harbinger's core. Optics focused on the organic.

Harbinger would have felt surprise at the sight of the human. The male wore no modern armor and looked weak compared to others of its kind. The organic tapped a button on its arm-pad and a weapon seemed to materialize in his hands. A metal tube was hoisted onto his shoulders and fired.

In its last seconds of existence Harbinger estimated that the resulting crash on Earth would most likely kill the human, and it felt satisfied.

The Surface of Earth

Admiral David Anderson watched in joy and horror as the largest Reaper they knew of fell from the sky. He was glad because the monster was going to crash and burn, but he was horrified at the potential loss of human life. He was thinking of the humans that were going to be crushed by the falling behemoth when he heard one of his men shout, "Sir! Explosions detected all along the Reaper!"

The last word had left his mouth when there was an immense blast from within the Reaper, followed swiftly by an implosion as the Mass effect core destabilized. The roar of both nearly deafened the Anderson, and he winced. When he returned his eyes to the remains of the reaper he saw what looked like a shuttle flying towards the city.

Quickly pulling out a pair of binoculars his looked through them to see the back half of a shuttle, somehow still flying in their direction. He watched in amazement as the ship began to die and a human shape jumped from the shuttle and onto the back of a passing harvester. He caught a glimpse of Blue jumpsuit before the creature flew out of sight.

Licking his lip he entered the command structure and told his men to start packing up. They looked at him somewhat oddly but obeyed his orders. They were out of the base and down the road two miles when there was a telltale explosion where the base had been, signaling that the Reapers had found it.

The Admiral and his men sped up their movement. They were heading away from London, where they had been watching the construction of some sort of device. They had been moving for almost an hour when they saw something down the road coming towards them. Anderson signaled for his men to get off the road and into cover.

It took a while but they eventually set up an ambush and waited for the Reaper patrol to pass. They expected some human and Turian Reapers followed by a horde of husks to pass along the road. What they did not expect was a lightly armored human in a blue jumpsuit with only a pistol to pass them by with a wave and a jaunty step to his walk.

Anderson felt better that he had in a long while when he watched the lone man, wandering down the road without a care in the world.

London, Big Ben

Major Jim Coates breathed in deeply and pressed the trigger down. A banshee's head was blown off. There was an earth-shattering shriek as the remainder of the Banshees looked for the killer of their fellow Reaper. One spotted him in his nest and they began to converge on his position from all directions.

Coates swallowed and ejected his thermal clip and inserted another. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was going to die in only a few minutes, but that did not mean that he was going to go down without a fight. Aiming another shot he took the right arm off a marauder and the left leg of another. Switching targets he picked off close to twenty before they finally began to climb the tower. He swapped to his submachine gun and waited for them to reach the top.

He heard what sounded like an overheated pistol being fired. Not one to leave a fellow fighter to die, Coates drew out of cover and lined up on a target. It was only then that he allowed what was happening to register, a single human was killing the horde that had been climbing the tower. He was firing into the oncoming horde with precision shots. After a few more shots it looked like he ran out of ammo and simply dropped his gun.

Coates was sure that the man was going to die and began firing into the Reaper drones in an attempt to get their focus back on him. Half the horde diverted its attention for a second before a new roar joined the ones coming from the Reapers. This roar however, came from a spinning metal barrel that was administering death at an alarming rate.

The man had pulled a Gatling gun from somewhere, and was using it to destroy the remainder of the reapers. When the last of them died, the gun was gone and the pistol was back. Coates looked in awe at the man and received a kind smile in return. The man waved and turned around.

Coates watched as the lone man wandered off, the only way to identify him the number on his back; 101.

The Room of Diana Allers, War Journalist

"And last, we have some news from the home front. I have received word that there is still a fight on Earth, the people have not given up hope and are still giving their all to the Reapers.

I have a bit of fantasy for you, viewers. It seems that there is a man who crashed on Earth and has helped the resistance fight the Reapers. This mystery man is none other than 101, the man that none other than Commander Shepard picked up from Palaven. You may recall the reports that a mad man stole a refugee shuttle a few weeks back? Well we have confirmation that it was indeed 101 who stole that shuttle, and not only that but it has been confirmed that the Reaper identified as 'Harbinger' was destroyed by this man alone!

I have for you viewers, a retelling of one of our marine's encounter with this mysterious stranger:

'Hello, my name is Private Samuel Finch… and I was recently saved by the Wanderer. I heard one of my COs call him that a few weeks ago and I thought he was just a myth! Okay, here's the thing… me and my platoon were assigned to blow some mega structure that the Reapers are building, we get into the town and we think the place is empty.

'My buddy Al decides to be a d #k and screw around and he starts playing with some stuff, and he drops it. The thing makes a noise, and then we're crawling in husks! They start killing us off left and right, when suddenly they start running out of town. And they do not all run off in random directions, they are running to something.

'so we look at the thing and blow it to kingdom come and the LT decides to see what had the husks change their target. And we go to where they were heading, and we see piles… literally piles… of dead Reapers! Somebody had killed 'em all. We walked around the bodies and we see this guy, one guy, with a pistol in his hand guarding a little girl. And the gun was old school, but I'm talking real old school; man, it shot friggin lead bullets! And he is just killing an army of these things! When he kills the last one he just looks at us, face covered in Reaper guts, smiles, pats the little girl on the head and turns and walks away!

'One lone friggin guy in a blue jumpsuit with some padding! And he's slaughtering these things!"

"Well you heard it here viewers, and to the Lone Wanderer… wherever you are, thank you."

Earth, the rush to the transporter Beam

Shepard tried to drag himself up from the ground. He had to reach the transporter; this was the galaxies last stand. He couldn't let them down; he couldn't let Anderson down. Climbing back to his feet he felt a hand on his shoulder. Looking up he saw a face he never thought he would see again; the Lone Wanderer, as he had been christened.

The mute smiled benevolently at the tired hero and shook his head. Shepard would have objected, had he had the strength. He fell to his knees and watched as the Man identified only by a number walked towards the blue beam. A medic rushed to his side and began hauling him away, but not before he caught a glimpse of a marauder letting the Wanderer pass him.

Shepard is dragged onto the same shuttle as Liara and Garrus, the former of who grabs him and gives him a heart-warming kiss. The shuttle takes off and is intercepted by the Normandy. As he is rushed to the infirmary he shouts out to the ship, "The Wanderer is still in there! Joker spread the word!"

The Citadel

The Illusive Man holds Admiral Anderson immobile, waiting for Shepard to come. There are footsteps on the stairs and the Illusive Man looks to see his guest, it is not Shepard. Walking up the stairs is a man in an armored blue jumpsuit with the number 101 printed in yellow on it.

The Illusive Man scowls at the fact that he could not give the speech he had so looked forward to giving. Narrowing his eyes he pulls a pistol from his back and prepares to shoot the man in the back as he enters the room.

The Lone Wanderer walks into the chamber and shoots the strange man in the corner. The Illusive man looks down at his chest in shock and horror as the plasma eats at him and he slowly dissolves into a pile of radioactive goo.

David Anderson, released from the Illusive Man's grip, falls to the floor before his muscles can get used to being back in control of their own body. The aging man groans as he pulls himself into a sitting position, looking out at the space battle raging around the citadel. He watches as the Reapers are killed and kill, knowing that they had come so far only to fail now. He begins to weep at their failure, only to feel a gentle hand on his back. Looking up he sees the same stranger that he had seen kill Harbinger. The man was smiling behind a large amount of scruffy beard and long curly hair.

"Who are you?" David had to know, who was this man who wandered the wastes of Earth like they were his home.

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely," The man responded and gave the tired Admiral a bottle.

He then stood and stepped onto a platform, which began to rise. Anderson watched as the Lone Wanderer, 101, the Wasteland Messiah left him to go on one last journey.

The Catalyst's Chamber

The Lone Wanderer breathed in deeply and smiled, all was right. The people of this world would be safe and he would be done. He had saved his home from the Enclave, slavers, and the Legion. He had finished, but he had not died, as he wanted. He had lost Sarah oh so long ago, and his number had been up for so long, but it never came. He had wanted to die in a blaze, doing what he was born to do; just like Sarah had.

He had been born to save the world, and now he had that chance. He did not know how he had gotten to that strange moon and in reality he did not care. He had been given the chance to go again. Then he had heard that Earth was a waste once more, and his home beckoned.

Home… but is was not home without Sarah. And so he would do what needed to be done here. He would do what he was born to do. Become a legend that people rallied behind, the symbol of resistance, the hope of the weak, the sword of the strong.

And now he was listening to a small hologram tell him he was to do what it wanted. He remembered the last time a computer had made demands of him, Eden. And the president of the enclave was no more. The small hologram demanded that he choose one of the two subscribed paths.

Looking at the glowing red rods and the glowing blue rods, 101 decided to wander off the beaten path once more. A quick tap on his pip boy had him holding the weapon from Point Lookout, the microwave emitter. The hologram made another demand and the Wanderer spun and fired his gun.

The wave of microns exited the gun and struck the construct and it wailed in agony. As it wailed, so did the Reapers. The tide of the battles in space and on the surface had changed with his action, just like it always did.

The chamber in which the hologram and the Wanderer stood began to fall apart as its master fell to disarray. Large chunks of metal fell, destroying equipment and shattering the floor and walls. Atmosphere began to leak from the station and into space. Alarms wailed and there was clear indication that an explosion would occur if any more damage was done.

The Wasteland Messiah listened to the hologram as it said its last words, "Why! So much planning! So much Work! Are you happy! Are you pleased to had destroyed the careful order I built! Now the synthetics and organics will fight a war until the end of time! WAR!"

"War…war never changes," with these last words he fired the emitter into the hologram from point blank range. The construct gave another ungodly wail and disintegrated. Outside the Reapers ceased operating as their connection to the Catalyst was shattered, with no protocols to call upon the machines failed to respond as the Fleet of Human, Turian, Asari, Krogan, Salarian, Geth, and Quarian ships fired upon them.

In the Catalyst's chamber, James Neeson Jr. Smiled one more time before the fires of the exploding presidium destroyed the room he was in and him with it.


End file.
